1. Field to which the invention relates
The present invention relates to a method for excitation of, that is to say production of, a population inversion in molecular hydrogen in a hydrogen laser, and to hydrogen lasers for carrying out such methods.
2. The prior art
Hydrogen lasers with molecular hydrogen as a laser medium are described for example in the paper of R. W. Dreyfus and R. T. Hodgson in Phys. Rev. A9 (1974) 2635. In the case of these prior art hydrogen lasers a singly state of the hydrogen molecule is produced by electron collision excitation. These prior art lasers are not continuously tunable.